by C Tanner

Created on: October 12, 2009

Coping with and surviving a divorce is challenging to all parties but if you find yourself as the spouse who actually wants the marriage to continue, being faced with the fact that your partner no longer wishes to spend his/her life with you can have a devastating impact on your self-esteem and emotional state. You may feel "blind-sided" and ask yourself repeatedly what you did to drive him/her away. More often than not these feelings are expressed in the form of bitterness, anger and sadly, vindictiveness.

The first thing you should realize is that the demise of a marriage is very rarely one-sided. This isn't to say that you were "not good enough"; it simply means that if you evaluate your relationship closely and objectively you will find that there were several indications along the way that the marriage wasn't what it should be. Just because you weren't the one to ask for the divorce doesn't mean you were actually happy...more likely you were simply content with the dynamics of the relationship. There are many reasons people stay in a marriage that isn't healthy but don't confuse a decision to stay married with marital bliss.

The truth is that many people are simply in love with the "idea of marriage" and not necessarily in love with the person they entered into it with. It's not always easy to identify that you're not compatible with the person you share a bed with when you're busy putting a fresh coat of paint on that white picket fence you have staked out on your front lawn. Put the paint brush down, take a deep breath and stop trying to figure out where it all went wrong.

You must take the necessary steps to find peace with and acceptance of situation. Go back to your initial reaction to the divorce announcement; you were probably thinking "who is this person I was married to all these years?" Well that might be your first step in the right direction of coping, if you didn't see it coming you probably know very little about your soon to be ex-spouse. He/she turned out to not be the person you thought they were and that's OK. The most important thing is to find out who you really are and how you handle the divorce will be an exhibition of your character so for your own good make sure you present yourself in a manner that you're proud of.

With the unfortunate increase in divorce cases, there's plenty of case law and guidelines that will protect you, your children and your community interests...so keep a level head, go your homework and think only about

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